There appears to be the potential for a delay on Challenger 3 but quite an interesting one. I have yet to see it reported from a serious source but there seems to be an issue with the turret gearbox turning the turret due to increased weight.
That’s all the information given and personally I believe its something that a little too on the nose to be looked over by engineers, it isn’t a matter of can/can’t rotate as we have pictures of the Chally 3’s turret at a number of angles but I would guess it’s excessive wear on the mechanism.
If the reporting is true, its interesting at least to see that there is likely a notable increase to the weight of the turret via armour. Great for us potentially, as weight is how the developers dismissed the Abrams improved protection, thus we can argue (likely in vain) increased protection from this.
Tea > Armour any day, they just need to simulate the appropriate buffs of having good tea in combat. Things like immunity to 120-125mm APFSDS rounds and 0.001 second reload times.
I did see that RBSL claimed there would be no major delays if any at all. For a company dealing with the complexity of an MBT I’m sure that a gearbox is not beyond them. I did try to be as cautious in my wording as possible due to the phenomenal quality of the sources of this news such as 1945 and yahoo but, if it’s true, it’s just nice to know that even if there is or isn’t a delay from it, that the turrets weight has sufficiently increased to merit a reinforced gearbox.
Gaijin most likely: “Sources say it’s more advanced so 2t of additional wiring is feasible, it’s unlikely to be armour. We will make a mental note to add wiring to the turret as a destroyable module.”
I am convinced that one of the Gaijin devs was related to an Iraqi tank crewman… nobody can have such a consistent hatred of anything called ‘Challenger’ for so long and so consistently otherwise.
Any composite that thin would be simply useless. If you were able to produce a composite tile that thin and it was effective enough to justify slapping it all over the tank the composite internally would be made of that magic, and tanks would only weigh 40-50 tons at the Challenger’s size…
